Are you wondering how to promote cooking classes on Pinterest? Pinterest is a natural fit for a cooking class business. Although you shouldn’t ignore your male demographics, the majority of attendees are likely to be women or couples. That means that you need to reach them on the social media where they hang out.

According to Business Insider, about 81% of Pinterest users are women. Of course, there are many other factors to consider when promoting on Pinterest, including how you can reach out to a local audience and how you can offer classes to those who aren’t local.

Reaching a Local Audience

Your immediate thought about social media might be that it will be too difficult to reach a local audience, but you actually can target those in your area.

Start with Family & Friends

The first place to start is with family and friends who live locally. Ask them to follow you on Pinterest and to share your pins both on Pinterest boards and on other social media sites. This will point other local people back to your Pinterest page where they too can follow you.

Ask for Referrals

Next, pull out your list of current customers. Ask them to follow you on Pinterest. Ask them to share your pins and to tell others about your classes. You could even offer an incentive for this, such as a discount off your next class when a friend signs up for one.

Targeted Advertising

You can also use targeted advertising on social media. My personal preference is Facebook, because I’ve had the most success with that platform and various types of ads, including some for a blog I run that has recipes and tips for saving money. The audience can be narrowed down by interests, location, gender, and other habits.

You can definitely still advertise a Pinterest pin on Facebook. You simply create a post that links to one of your pins and boost it. Or, you can just create an ad outright that is aimed at driving people to your Pinterest page.

Offering Classes World-Wide

Once you’ve saturated your local market, you will likely start looking at ways to expand your customer base. You can only teach so many classes and you only have a limited capacity to host a set number of students in each class. But, what if you could reach hundreds of students at a time?

Video Classes

Probably the easiest thing to do that will open up your customer base is to videotape the classes you already offer and to set up a membership area on your website. Users then pay a fee to access a class and you can make those videos available to them.

You can decide if you’ll allow questions and discussion, one-on-one consultations, etc.

Offering Sharable Pins

One of the easiest ways to attract new customers around the world is to create pins that people will want to share. So, you might write up one of your recipes and post it on your blog and pin it to a board. There are many other ways to promote your classes, but this is a great place to start that is Pinterest specific.

When to Promote Cooking Classes

There are many schools of thought about the best times of day to promote on Pinterest. The people over at Buffer spend a lot of time studying traffic trends on social media. When it comes to Pinterest, the site behaves a bit differently than a more business oriented site such as LinkedIn.

Buffer suggests pinning 5-30 times a day (minimum of 30) for maximum impact. The best days and times to post are Saturdays and in the afternoon and evening hours. This is likely because women finally have a minute to sit down and browse the Internet at these times.

Pinterest and Cooking Go Hand in Hand

Pinterest is a smart place to promote your cooking classes. The audience is naturally suited for this type of business model. People on the social media site are often looking for recipes and ideas for meal plans. Provide high quality content consistently and you’ll start to build a following.